Galtland Index

Second Treatise of Government

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Second Treatise of Government

The Second Treatise of Government is John Locke’s 1689 essay (the second of his Two Treatises) and the single most influential statement of natural-rights political theory. It is the keystone of the natural-law lineage as the libertarian tradition receives it.

The Argument

Locke begins not with the state but with the state of nature: a condition of “perfect freedom” and equality that is nonetheless not a state of license, because it “has a law of nature to govern it… and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Rights and obligations are thus prior to government, not created by it.

Property is the Treatise’s most consequential move. Although the earth is given to mankind in common, “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.” By mixing the “labour of his body, and the work of his hands” with unowned nature, a person makes external things his own — property arises pre-politically and pre-consensually, subject to the early “Lockean provisos” (leave “enough, and as good” for others; do not let it spoil). This labour theory of acquisition is the direct ancestor of the libertarian homesteading principle.

Government by consent. Because men are naturally free, legitimate political power can arise only by consent, and men consent to it for one end: the “mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.” Government is therefore a fiduciary trust, strictly limited to that purpose.

The right of revolution. When a government invades the rights it was instituted to protect — when it acts without law, or for its own ends — it dissolves the trust and “the people” may resume their power. This is the Treatise’s revolutionary edge and the seed of the American founding’s later phrase, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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The Second Treatise is the hinge between classical natural law and modern liberty. It receives the Ciceronian and Grotian natural-law inheritance and converts it into a theory of individual rights and limited government, which Rothbard later radicalizes into anarcho-capitalism and Spooner into individualist anarchism. Its labour-mixing account underlies Nonaggression and Property Rights. Locke remains a limited-government theorist, not an anarchist — the point at which his heirs divide.

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